This ChatGPT browser is genuinely impressive. Will anyone actually use it?

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman wants to change how 3 billion people use the internet.

Altman, who is behind the wildly popular chatbot ChatGPT, on Wednesday unveiled Atlas: an AI browser he described as a “once-in-a-decade opportunity” and “the way that we hope people will use the internet in the future”.

The announcement immediately sent shares in Google’s parent company Alphabet tumbling 2 per cent – wiping billions from its valuation – as investors digested the threat to Chrome’s mammoth user base.

OpenAI is taking on Google with its Atlas browser.Credit: Monique Westermann

The promise is genuinely compelling. Atlas features an “Ask ChatGPT” sidebar that follows you across every webpage, eliminating the tedious copy-pasting between tabs. Imagine reading a movie review and instantly summoning an AI to digest it, or spotting a recipe and having ChatGPT build your shopping list. For ChatGPT Plus and Pro subscribers, “agent mode” can autonomously handle web tasks such as booking flights or making restaurant reservations.

“This launch marks a step toward a future where most web use happens through agentic systems,” Altman said, “where you can delegate the routine and stay focused on what matters most.”

For OpenAI’s 800 million weekly ChatGPT users, it’s the logical next step in the company’s ambitions to become the default operating system for the AI age.

Sam Altman, co-founder and chief executive of OpenAI.Credit: AP

I’ve been using an AI browser – Comet by OpenAI rival Perplexity – myself for a couple of months. Some of the stuff it can do still wows me regularly: it can look at my fantasy football team and suggest trades, or can find the cheapest hotel room in Las Vegas on a given night. It’s literally browsing the web on my behalf, which feels like magic sometimes, as the best of AI does.

Altman’s framing of AI browsers being revolutionary has some merit, provided he’s able to pull it off. He argues correctly that tabs were revolutionary in their day but haven’t sparked meaningful innovation since. Today, browsing the web is typically a pretty similar experience whether you’re browsing with Chrome, Safari or anything else. It’s not that magical.

Switching browsers isn’t like trying a new coffee blend. It’s more like switching banks.

If Altman can even partially realise his vision, there are huge rewards on offer in gaining market share and winning over billions of daily internet users.

Australian software giant Atlassian is making a similar bet, recently buying the start-up behind Silicon Valley’s buzziest AI-powered browser in a deal worth nearly $1 billion.

OpenAI’s new AI browser Atlas.

“Browsers were built for the wrong era,” Cannon-Brookes told me at the time. “They were built for people reading news articles or recipes, not for people living eight hours a day in applications like Jira, Salesforce, Gmail or Slack. AI changes that equation – it means the browser can become your memory of everything you’ve done at work.”

OpenAI’s new AI browser Atlas.

I think Altman and Cannon-Brookes are onto something. But there’s also a sobering reality check: getting Australians to change their browser is about as easy as getting them to change dentist or barber. Most simply won’t bother.

Google’s Chrome commands 54 per cent of Australian browser usage, with Apple’s Safari in second place at 27 per cent. And people are creatures of habit: switching browsers isn’t like trying a new coffee blend. It’s more like switching banks: straightforward on paper, sure, but psychologically exhausting with bookmarks, passwords, history, credit card data to worry about.

OpenAI isn’t naïve about this challenge. The company is dangling increased ChatGPT data limits for seven days to anyone who sets Atlas as their default browser - a digital carrot to sweeten the deal. But incentives only work if people feel the pain point you’re solving. Browsers, overall, work just fine.

And that’s where things get interesting. Early testing suggests AI browsing agents struggle with complex tasks, working well for simple jobs but faltering on more cumbersome problems. If Atlas’s killer feature – autonomous web agents – can’t reliably deliver, it’s just another browser with a chatbot bolted on.

There’s also the trust question. Atlas includes optional “browser memories” that learn preferences over time, though OpenAI promises not to train models on browsing data unless users opt in. For a company that’s been cagey about data practices, asking Australians to hand over their entire browsing history requires a leap of faith many won’t take.

The real test won’t be the tech journalists like me or early adopters fawning over buzzy AI features. It’ll be whether my cousin on the Gold Coast switches from Chrome, or my colleague in Sydney actually uses agent mode to book their Bali holiday. Browser loyalty isn’t rational. It’s habitual, stubborn and deeply embedded.

If anyone has the resources and brand recognition to pull off such a market shift, it’s OpenAI, now valued at $US500 billion and fresh off multibillion-dollar deals with Nvidia, Broadcom and AMD.

Altman’s heady vision of AI-native browsing might very well be the future. But first, he’s got to convince millions of Australians that the future is worth the hassle of leaving the past behind.

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